Thank you!

Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.

George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857)

George Washington Parke Custis
was a writer and orator who worked to preserve the legacy of their stepgrandfather,
George Washington. Born
in Maryland, Custis moved to Mount
Vernon after the death of his father in 1781. He was expelled from college,
served in the army, and lost election to the House of Delegates before moving to an
inherited estate he called Arlington. In addition, Custis owned two other large plantations and
property in four other counties. He promoted agricultural reform and commercial
independence and disapproved of slavery on economic grounds, supporting gradual emancipation and colonization.
During the War of 1812, Custis manned
a battery, helped Dolley
Madison save Washington's portrait at the White House, and delivered
well-received orations on a variety of topics. In the years after the war, he began
writing essays, often about Washington's family and career. He later turned to the
penning of historical plays and operettas. Pocahontas; or, The
Settlers of Virginia, from 1830, was dedicated to John Marshall and remains his most durable work. The
patriotism of his plays fed into his work to preserve the legacy of his
stepgrandfather. Custis curated a collection of Washington relics made available for
public view and sometimes distributed as gifts. He arranged for portraits of
Washington and painted his own scenes of life during the American Revolution (1775–1783). Custis died at
Arlington in 1857. MORE...

Map This Entry

Share It

Early Years

Custis was born on April 30, 1781, at Mount
Airy, his maternal grandfather's estate in Prince George's County, Maryland. His
elder sisters included Elizabeth Parke Custis Law and Eleanor "Nelly" Parke Custis Lewis,
both of whom shared his devotion to preserving the legacy of George Washington.
Their father, John Parke
Custis, a planter and member of the House of Delegates, died on November
5, 1781, and on November 20, 1783, their mother, Eleanor Calvert Custis, married
David Stuart, a physician
and later a member of the Convention of 1788, and began a
second family. Custis and his sister Nelly Custis grew up in the household of
their paternal grandmother, Martha Custis Washington, and her second husband, George Washington, but
Stuart, as Custis's stepfather, remained his official guardian.

Custis was expelled from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in
September 1797 for repeated misbehavior and left Saint John's College, in
Annapolis, in July 1798 without completing his studies. Commissioned on January
10, 1799, a cornet in the army called up to meet the threat of war with France and
promoted to second lieutenant on March 3 of that year, he served with a troop of
Alexandria light dragoons
and was discharged on June 15, 1800, with the brevet rank of major. In April 1802
Custis stood for election to the House of Delegates from Fairfax County as an old-line Federalist,
opposing any further erosion of property qualifications for voting. He outpolled
his stepfather but placed third among four candidates vying for the two seats.

Planter, Reformer, and Orator

Less than a month after the election Martha
Washington died. After an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Mount Vernon from
George Washington's nephew and heir, Custis moved to an 1,100-acre Alexandria
County estate inherited from his father that he first called Mount Washington but
soon renamed Arlington, for an ancestral property on the Eastern Shore. The estate lay in the area that
Virginia had ceded to the federal government to become part of the District of
Columbia and that Congress retroceded after a referendum in 1846. Custis owned two
other large plantations totaling approximately 9,000 acres of land, Romancock in
King William County
and White House in New Kent
County, which provided the foodstuffs and revenues to support him on his
park estate at Arlington. He also inherited property in Northampton County, including Smith Island,
and through marriage acquired land in Richmond, Stafford, and Westmoreland counties.

Custis believed slavery was an economic detriment to southern agriculture and
blamed the institution for his financial problems. He supported the efforts of the
American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States
(popularly known as the American Colonization Society), but his opposition to the
institution in theory did not lead him to manumit more than a handful of his
slaves, nor did it prevent him from putting slaves on the auction block as punishment or when he became
strapped for money.

On July 7, 1804, in the city of Alexandria,
Custis married Mary Lee
Fitzhugh, daughter of William Fitzhugh, a member of the Convention of
1776 and of the Continental Congress, and sister of William Henry
Fitzhugh, a member of the Convention of 1829–1830. A
prominent Episcopal lay leader and supporter of manumission and colonization, she
died on April 23, 1853. Of their four daughters, only Mary Randolph Custis, who married Robert E. Lee, survived infancy.
With a Custis family
slave, Airy Carter,
Custis had a daughter, Maria
Carter, whom he educated and informally freed and to whom he gave about
seventeen acres of the Arlington estate. She married and became the matriarch of a
distinguished family that included her sons John B. Syphax, a member of the House of Delegates, and William Syphax, a prominent
educator in Washington, D.C.

Deeply concerned about American dependency on foreign manufactures, Custis
promoted commercial independence through agricultural reform and the improvement
of domestic varieties of livestock. He described his vision in An Address to the People of the United States, on the Importance of
Encouraging Agriculture and Domestic Manufactures(1808). Custis developed
two breeds of sheep, the long-wooled Arlington Improved and the fine-wooled
Smith's Island, also noted for the flavor of its mutton. Annual sheep shearings he
held at Arlington from 1805 through 1812 evolved into full-scale agricultural
fairs offering premiums for the best blankets, stockings, and yarn and to the
family relying the least on imported material. Held on April 30, the date
Washington had taken the oath of office as first president and therefore
regularly celebrated by Federalists, the event became highly partisan. Custis closed each fair
with an oration advocating the Federalist program, decrying the dangers of
universal manhood suffrage, or warning of the threat to American liberty posed by
Napoléon I.

During the War of 1812 Custis, an animated,
gifted orator, became a speaker much in demand. On September 1, 1812, he delivered
the funeral oration for James M. Lingan, a Revolutionary War veteran murdered by a
Jeffersonian mob in Baltimore after helping to reopen and defend a Federalist
newspaper office. Custis's stirring address, a tribute to the freedom of the
press, was printed in Federalist pamphlets under various titles and circulated
throughout the country. The following June 5 he addressed a Georgetown audience
celebrating the failure of Napoléon's campaign in Russia. Custis helped man a
battery at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814, and after the rout of the
American army stopped at the White House to make sure that Dolley Madison moved
Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington to safety.

Writer

During the marquis de Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United
States in 1825, Custis began recording Lafayette's reminiscences of Washington,
the Revolutionary War, and his own life and published them in sixteen parts in
Alexandria's Phenix Gazette as "Conversations of La
Fayette." The enthusiastic public response led Custis to begin setting down his
own recollections of growing up at Mount Vernon. For the next three decades he
wrote occasional essays on various aspects of Washington's life and the
Revolution. These recollections often ran in the Alexandria or Washington
newspapers on such anniversaries as Washington's Birthday or the Fourth of July or
at times of national crisis, such as the sectional clash preceding the 'Compromise
of 1850, in order to rekindle the fires of reconciliation and patriotism by
reminding Americans of the achievements and sacrifices of Washington. Important
for the details they contain about Washington in private life, Custis's
recollections are also significant because in many cases they were the first
appearance in print of certain stories. An 1826 essay on Mary Ball Washington, for example, was the first
detailed piece ever printed about Washington's mother, and it remained the chief
source for all nineteenth‑century historians examining Washington's childhood. In
"His Portrait," another 1826 essay, Custis wrote that Washington had once thrown a
piece of slate the size and shape of a dollar coin across the Rappahannock River. Custis
never consummated plans to publish his essays in a single volume, but his daughter
and the editor and illustrator Benson John Lossing collected many of the newspaper
articles and family letters after his death and published them as Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington in several
editions in 1859, 1860, and 1861.

At about the same time he embarked on the
recollections, Custis began writing historical plays. Texts of only three of his
ten plays survive. The lyrics of four songs from another appeared in contemporary
newspapers. The plots of the others must be reconstructed from advertisements,
playbills, reviews, and enigmatic comments in correspondence. All but one of his
ten plays revolve around episodes in America's past and fit securely in the
National Drama genre. Indian Prophecy; or Visions of Glory,
premiered in Philadelphia on July 4, 1827, and was published with a variant
subtitle the next year. A prosy, static drama with little action, the story of a
meeting in 1770 between George Washington and an Indian chief who recounts an
incident from the Seven Years'
War and predicts military glory for Washington during the American
Revolution nevertheless attracted such nationally prominent actors as Edwin
Forrest and Joseph Jefferson Jr. and was revived at theaters across the country
for the next dozen years. The Rail Road (1828), an operetta
set in Baltimore and billed in the District of Columbia in 1829 as The Rail Road and Canal, had received at least 100
performances by December 1833. The operetta The Eighth of
January, or, Hurra for the Boys of the West! celebrated Andrew Jackson's
victory at the Battle of New Orleans and premiered in New York City sometime
before 1830. Custis wrote The Pawnee Chief; or, Hero of the
Prairie about 1830, but it was not performed until 1832.

Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (1830), dedicated
to John Marshall, was Custis's most popular and durable work. Modern drama
anthologies occasionally reprint it as the best surviving example of the
historical genre. North Point, or, Baltimore Defended
(1833) included a spectacular reenactment of the British bombardment of Fort
McHenry during the War of 1812 and featured as a major character an African
American veteran of the Revolutionary War. Custis planned a three-act Tecumseh, or The Last of the Braves (1833) for production in
New York with Edwin Forrest in the title role but may never have completed it. The Launch of the Columbia, or, America's Blue Jackets
Forever (1836) was a musical farce celebrating a frigate's launch in
Washington. Custis wrote Montgomerie, or, The Orphan of a
Wreck in 1830, but this unsuccessful melodramatic pastiche of Hamlet and Sir Walter Scott received its only recorded
performances in1836. In the latter year he completed Monongahela, or, Washington on the First Great Field of His Fame, which
he sent to Edward Everett in 1839 in a failed effort to have the work mounted in
Boston.

Later Years

Custis used both his plays and his
recollections of Washington to arouse patriotic feelings. As sectional tensions
intensified, he sought to remind northerners and southerners of their common
heritage by calling to mind the days of the Revolution when the separate colonies
had come together and thrown off the British yoke. Only by recovering the legacy
of Washington and the Revolution could the declension be halted. As part of his
memorializing and preservation efforts, Custis placed a marker at Washington's
birthplace in 1815 and enthusiastically supported an abortive congressional
resolution in 1832 to disinter the president and his wife from Mount Vernon and to
rebury them under the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

He made his own Washington Treasury, as he called his collection of Washington
items, available for public viewing and distributed Washington relics in order to
inspire public figures to follow in Washington's footsteps. Henry Clay, for
example, received a fragment of Washington's coffin, which he brandished on the
floor of the U.S. Senate when he introduced his compromise resolutions in 1850. By
his own reckoning, Custis averaged one letter a week from people seeking
information on Washington or asking for Washington autographs. He usually obliged
autograph-seekers, and after he had given the last available signature to Queen
Victoria, he began cutting up the account books in which Washington had recorded
his management of the Custis estate. By distributing relics of Washington, Custis
hoped to preserve the legacy of the Revolution and save the increasingly fragile
Union.

Custis also contributed to the visual record
of Washington. A number of artists went to Arlington to copy or engrave the Custis
and Washington family portraits. Other painters, including Emmanuel Leutze,
corresponded with Custis about which life portrait best represented the first
president. In his last years, Custis devoted increasing attention to painting
charmingly naive scenes from the American Revolution as described to him by
Washington. He occasionally exhibited his monumental canvases at the U.S. Capitol,
and several were reproduced in Harper's New Monthly
Magazine in 1853. The days of the Revolution became his life. In 1848 he
wrote, "The old Orator you know boasts of having two
Religions, (most people have but one & many none) while I have the
Religion of Christianity & the Religion of the Revolution."

For four decades Custis regularly gave speeches, often supporting the national
independence movements of Greece, Poland, and South America. The cause of Irish
independence he held particularly dear. A favored orator and sometime president of
the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, Custis counted Saint Patrick's Day
with Washington's Birthday and the Fourth of July as the three "holydays" he
celebrated. Custis, who enjoyed playing the role of the Child of Mount Vernon and
the Last Survivor of the Family of Washington, died of influenza at Arlington on
October 10, 1857, and was buried there. His will ordered the emancipation of his
196 slaves within five years of his death.

Major Works

An Address to the People of the United States, on the
Importance of Encouraging Agriculture and Domestic
Manufactures(1808)